Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

“A policeman might recognize you, but he doesn’t care if you see his face. Carey said you thought someone wasn’t just trying to get you arrested. Is that true?”

“Yes. I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Jane found that Dahlman was walking a little faster now, but it cost him great effort. They moved down the street toward the corner. Just as they turned up Carroll Street, Jane saw the two men coming away from the lighted lobby entrance of the hospital and walking toward the door where she had first seen them. She said, “We’re in trouble. They didn’t go into the lobby entrance. You’re too weak to run, it’s too late to hide, and I’m not carrying anything that would scare them”—the answer came to her as she heard herself say it—“off.” She leaned close to him and said, “Can you keep walking?”

“I can, but—”

“Then do it. Walk straight up the street to the small brick building over there. It’s Carey’s office. No matter what anyone does, keep walking. Go around to the little parking lot in back. Sit down between the gray car and the brick wall. Don’t move. If they follow you, try to watch them but don’t let them see you. Got it?”

“I heard it,” said Dahlman.

“Do it.” Jane pivoted away from him, then stepped along the side of the hospital building. As soon as she was out of sight of the sidewalk she began to run. She knew that she must look insane running in a skirt, but in the narrow space beside the tall building nobody could see her. The weightless, flat shoes she had worn were better than she had expected.

She worked herself up into a sprint, dashing along the side of the building. Three stories above her, there were lighted windows where she knew that patients lay staring up at television sets that showed live shots of police officers milling around the hospital. Down here she was alone.

Just before she reached the lighted area at the far end of the building she slowed to a walk. She knew it would have to be the first try. She couldn’t walk up and loiter, looking for an opportunity. It had to be there and she would have to read it instantly.

Jane took a deep breath as she stepped around the corner into the light. The three television trucks had their booms up and their dishes turned toward their stations’ receivers. The ambulances were lined up in their spaces as before. No one was missing. There were five police cars now. Three had arrived after the emergency was over, so they had been parked in designated spaces with their doors closed.

She stepped along more quickly, her head held rigid, but her eyes scanning. She was closer now, and she could hear the same garbled radio noises she had heard when she had arrived. She passed to the right of the first police car, where she could see the ignition on the steering column, but the radio sound led her on past it.

The window of the second car was half open, and faint orange lights glowed on the dashboard. She angled away from the curb and passed the trunk. In a single, fluid movement, she reached for the door handle, swung open the driver’s door, and was in. She turned the key, brought down the gear selector, and stepped on the gas pedal. She didn’t let the car glide forward before she began the turn, because it would pass in front of the glass doors of the emergency room. Instead she wrenched the wheel to the left as far as it would go and swung around smoothly to drive the wrong way down the entrance lane.

Jane pulled out of the drive and accelerated up the straight, empty street away from the hospital. As she passed into the little splash of light under each street lamp she studied the interior of the police car: first the shotgun upright in the rack behind her right elbow, then the dashboard with its radio and mike and what looked like a computer screen, next some hard-sided notebooks that could be manuals or books of tickets or even the source of all of those forms that cops seemed to whip out when anything happened. It wasn’t until she reached the bright intersection that she found the switches she had been searching for.

She made the turn, drove past the hospital, and began to look for Dahlman. She searched for the two pursuers, but she could not see them either. Could they have run hard and caught him already? She tried to imagine it. They would have needed to recognize him, see her part from him, decide she was going for help, dash to catch him, and either kill him silently and hide the body or push him into a car.

Jane was nearly at Carey’s office. As she came to the parking lot, she spun the wheel sharply toward the entrance to make the car seem to have come from nowhere. As soon as her front wheels touched the driveway, she reached to the dashboard, switched on the red and blue lights, and stopped.

Just outside the beams of her headlights she discerned the two men walking toward the end of the building near a red car. If Dahlman had followed her instructions, then they must have seen him come as far as the building. If they were looking at the red car and not the gray, then they hadn’t found him yet. Their heads turned in her direction, then away. Jane put her hand on the upright shotgun beside her and waited. The men didn’t move.

Jane suspected they could see a head silhouetted in the windshield above the headlights, and she knew they could see the bright red and blue lights revolving on the roof. Maybe they could see Jane was alone, or even recognize her.

She closed her right hand on the grip of the shotgun, but didn’t lift it. Of course it would be loaded. There would be no shell in the chamber, but there would be five rounds of number four buckshot in a line ahead of it in the magazine.

With her left hand she switched on the spotlight mounted on her door, and manipulated the handle to sweep the beam along the side of the building. She let the car begin to drift forward slowly in their general direction as she shone the light on the door of the building, then along the ground near it, inching her way along like a cop who had received a prowler call. Then she swept the beam ahead to the corner of the building. The two men were gone.

She hit the gas pedal and shot forward to stop behind her own gray car, then waited. Where was Dahlman? She craned her neck to look in every direction, but she saw nothing. Her breath came out in a hiss through clenched teeth. She had come too late. The men must have killed him, and she had let them walk away. She began to turn the police car around, then hit the brake. Of course: What had she been thinking?

Dahlman was a fugitive. If he saw a police car pull into the lot with its lights flashing, would he come out of hiding and climb in? She backed up quickly, opened the door of the police car, and ran to the row of cars parked behind the building. “Dr. Dahlman?” she called.

“Here,” came the quiet voice behind her.

She whirled. “Where?”

Dahlman slowly stood up behind the low brick wall at the end of the lot. She stepped to the wall and helped him swing his legs over it.

“Did you see what they did when I got here?”

“They threw something over the wall. Over there someplace. I heard it but I couldn’t see what it was.”

Jane didn’t need to see. She vaulted over the brick wall and walked the weedy patch between the two parking lots. She found first one gun, then the other only a few feet away, picked them up, and ran to the police car. She looked around anxiously. “Get in.”

Jane helped him ease his body into the passenger’s seat, then handed him the two guns. “Hold these.”

She turned off the flashing lights and drove quickly out of the lot and up a dark side street, then turned and drove up another. She drove until she passed a house a mile away with its lights off and a FOR SALE sign stuck on the lawn. She stopped, backed up, and pulled into the driveway.